Always
by gallowsCallibrator
Summary: During Severus's fifth year at Hogwarts, he writes a letter to Lily that stays unsent.


**A/N: I don't own Harry Potter, or any of the characters. Everything belongs to J.K Rowling and her publishers. This story was for the challenge by cherryredxx, "Letters Challenge".**

My Dearest Lily Evans,

It's hard, sometimes, being the person who I am. Aloofness expected of me, deprived of all chances at emotion. Everyone expects me just to be a stone. An emotionless freak in the back of the classroom, nose buried in a book. Of course I'd never let those animals see me cry. If I did, father would hear about it for sure. And I remember what happened last time he heard about me shedding tears. (Let's just say, there's a reason my nose is so crooked and leave it at that). Sometimes when everything gets really difficult, I want to just end it all. It would be so simple to slip the wrong ingredient into my pumpkin juice, or wade too far into the lake within reach of the giant squid that sits there waiting. But I don't. I'm stronger than that, stronger than them. Whenever those horrible vermin you talk to are ridiculing me, the idiotic group of boys that call themselves "the Marauders", I just think of you, you know. Your sly poised smile, brimming with confidence and knowledge of the unknown. Your silky-smooth red hair draping down over your eyes when we study together in the school's library for finals, at the table in the very back of the room to the right side. The thought that you'd be there for me, no matter what life throws at us, through it all. You're my light, my always, the one that will be there for me throughout all of this, all of forever. No matter who you spend your days with, lest it be me, or your female classmates, or that Potter boy, I know that you're the one for me, and that someday I'll collect the courage to go up to you in the hall after Potions and tell you everything, all bits and pieces of me and what I really feel inside. That's what kept me going all these years: you.

When we first met, the summer before our fourth year at St. Helena Elementary School, I was taken with you the moment I laid eyes on your perfect porcelain face. You marched right up to me, and stuck out your delicate hand. "My name's Lily Evans, and you're going to be my friend," you proclaimed. Being the shy mild-mannered boy that I was, I thought it extremely peculiar that someone could be so up-front with her emotions. I had been raised by my father to believe that emotions were those of which to be dealt with quietly, privately, and that someone demanding things forthright was absurd. But I couldn't deny those bright green, intelligent eyes of yours. In fact, no one could. That's one of the reasons that I started to talk with you, learn about you, open up to you. You were, and still are, one of the most beautiful creatures I've ever had the pleasure of talking with. Over time, I grew to trust you. I told you all of my secrets, my insecurities, my thoughts on other people. And you granted me the gift of hearing your story. The way your parents acted when you got your acceptance letter to Hogwarts; how your jealous sister wrote a letter to headmaster Dumbledore asking to be put in Hogwarts as well; the excuses you gave to your (many) friends back home why you needed to leave and go off to a strange part of the country to an unfamiliar school. I was blessed with your company daily, and I lived for the moments when I would get to see you. And those moments, my dear Lily, made my life worth living.

Under no circumstances do I intend on delivering this letter to you, and am probably going to burn it as soon as I'm finished writing. But let me make this perfectly clear: Lily Evans, I, Severus Snape, am profoundly and irrefutably in love with you. I have spent countless nights lying awake in bed, imagining how to best profess my love for you, though I am certainly never going to put my thought into actions. Maybe this Christmas before the dance I'll have the nerve to ask you to go with me as friends, but I doubt even that will happen. Whenever you're near me I feel warm, when I get the chance to talk with you my stomach does flips. You are my one and only. The only person to make me feel this way. My lily flower. Today, tomorrow, and forever.  
>Always.<p>

Yours truly,

Severus Snape


End file.
